Because European governments and, to a greater or lesser extent European mainstream media, are playing a rather supine diplomatic game with the Trump administration, the raw import of the Trump administration’s recently promulgated National Security Strategy document has probably passed most European citizens by.
But it is available online in all its crudity and menace and should be recommended reading for every thinking adult with an interest and concern for our own future and that of the next generation. Where it is not explicit, its implicit content is all the more disturbing.
For certain, it is being closely studied in every foreign ministry worldwide. In ways, it is as revealing about what we can expect in the 2020s as Mein Kampf was a foretaste of what was to come in the world of the 1930s. It envisages a new world order dominated by an isolationist United States intent on making America “safer, richer, freer, greater and more powerful than ever before”.
Readers who have ever played the world conquest boardgame Risk will easily recognise the game’s yellow and green continents in what the document calls “The Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. It speaks of protecting America’s access to key geographies in “our Hemisphere”. The warning bells are sounding for Latin America, the Caribbean, Canada and Greenland.
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“Establishing and expanding” access in strategically important locations in the hemisphere is a declared aim. “Enlisting” is the new word for dominating the Americas. Electoral interference is referred to euphemistically as supporting regional political parties and movements. Strategic resources in the Americas are to be “jointly developed” with the US and its private investors.
“In the Western Hemisphere – and everywhere else in the world – the United States should make clear that American goods, services and technologies are a far better buy in the long run, because they are higher quality and do not come with the same strings attached.” Targeted taxation, unfair regulation and expropriation in the hemisphere that “disadvantages US business” will be ended.
“The terms of our agreements, especially with those countries that depend on us most and therefore over which we have to most leverage, must be sole-source contracts for our companies.” Even Canada can kiss goodbye, it seems, to any economic autonomy. You can hear the mining gear being readied for Greenland.
Dismantling the EU
As far as Europe is concerned, the strategy document cites economic decline and the activities of the EU as undermining “political liberty and sovereignty” with its migration policies, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates and loss of national identities and self-confidence. We now know that this is barely disguised signalling of intended Trump support and electoral interference aimed at dismantling the EU. Washington sources are openly targeting at least four countries for secession from the EU. It seems American hopes are pinned on electoral triumphs for the UK’s Nigel Farage and France’s Bardella-Le Pen movement.
Elon Musk has now called for the abolition of the EU. That is also the unspoken strategic aim of the American hard right. It isn’t remotely obvious how his declared and undeclared policy towards the EU squares with the document’s stated aim of “Making Europe Great Again”. Nobody can even outline what MEGA means for Europe. But the document singles out Ireland and the UK as parties to an important relationship with the US.
Strangely, Trump wants Europe at the same time to somehow strengthen militarily so as to be able to match Russian military and nuclear capacity – or at least the document suggests such a policy objective.
On Ukraine, the document is deeply ambivalent. It demands a stable relationship between Europe and Russia and an end to the war without even a hint of criticism of the Kremlin’s invasion. If there is to be a pre-Christmas ceasefire in Ukraine along the current frontline, there have to be security guarantees for Ukraine. They do not have to be Nato-based. But they must be real and backed with military hardware and financial support.
Trump is much more concerned with the military situation in the Western Pacific theatre. His East Asian strategy seems to be one of ongoing confrontation with China, including prevention of a Taiwan invasion and bolstering of Japanese, Taiwanese, Philippine and Korean defences with new weapon systems. Is there a hint of nuclearising Japanese defence capabilities?
And what of climate change? The document openly espouses massive expansion of US fossil fuel exploitation. The Cop summit in Belem turns out to be wind without energy, it seems. The US is decisively opting out of global climate-change politics. How long can Europe pursue that goal alone?
European states must go much further in containing racket-driven asylum-seeking posing as economic migration than what was attempted last week in Strasbourg. Failure to do so will deliver a fragmented Europe to Trump’s tender mercies.
